Seed to Sun

Lex; 2002

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Boom Bip's Seed to Sun isn't hip-hop. Hip-hop is dirty, concrete, in-your-face visceral, and reflective of an on-going public discourse. Seed to Sun, which is a mostly instrumental offering, is tightly enclosed and intensely internal; the sound doesn't attempt to capture the public zeitgeist, instead preferring to meander through a cryptic inner space in search of slight, fleeting emotions and repressed memories. At its best, it works as a soundtrack to the prolonged moments of silence that accompany technological isolation. Yet this isn't another dry, droid-like testament to the dystopia of post-millennial life. Its focus is generally more human than it is mechanical, and it's more tenderly emotive than it is dryly disjointed.

Although Seed to Sun is a very personal affair, the music is identifiably derivative. Boom Bip (aka Bryan Hollon) engages in what seems like incessant genre-hopping; suburban hip-hop, wankish laptop conceptualism, and cinematic post-rock are all indiscriminately plucked from Boom Bip's musical milieus and given generous footing on this record. Still, Hollon maintains a consistency throughout by constantly reinforcing his musical motifs. Looped, barely suppressed voices can be heard throughout, and a high-pitch ringing sound is never far off, acting as a musical highwire that the various breakbeats and synth lines cling to. Thematically, the album oscillates between three different moods: the intricate melancholy of monotony; the broad sweeping attempts to transcend the clutter; and what is perhaps the triumphant failure of the warring tensions: when Hollon abandons his attempts at transcendence and embraces the playful possibilities that flutter around the edges of the techno wasteland.

Seed to Sun works best when it's either quirkily repetitive or resigning itself to funky experimentation. When it attempts to be anthemic and triumphant, it falls flat. "Roads Must Rule," which kicks off the album, contains a looping violin sample that comes across as forced, clichéd, and more than a little similar to disposable soundtrack music that denotes a victorious climax. The circus music quality of "Newly Weds" wouldn't feel out of place as one of the brief musical interludes on Tom Waits' Swordfishtrombones, while "U R Here," which follows "Newly Weds," resembles Múm, except with a juicier hip-hop beat. The static and transposed conversations of "Pulse All Over" are effective if a bit incidental. The discordant vibe carries itself through the first minute of the next track, "Awaiting an Accident," before giving way to a smoky, almost gothic beat that sounds something like a Depeche Mode remix.

Hollon also offers a couple of vocal tracks which pop up sporadically throughout the album. "The Unthinkable," which features spoken-word artist Buck 65, boasts an ironically bouncy beat. "No matter what, I still can't sleep/ Everywhere I still see ghost," Buck 65 sings in the chorus, and the song feels like a half-awake recitation of random, eerie suburban imagery. The seemingly unrelated scenes that Buck 65 conjures are both mundane and magical, which can be said to inform Boom Bip's style in general. By extracting the minor aural nuances of everyday life and tinkering with them just enough to slightly skewer their context, Boom Bip conjures the artful from the mechanical like some wired snake charmer. At his best, he taps into the internal logic that guides the random beeps and squeaks that generally slide beneath our immediate consciousness. But when his hand is too strong, and he attempts to place the noises within a more traditional song structure, it's an embarrassing failure. Still, this is experimental music, and occasional failures can be forgiven.